Having ColdFusion run on the new Windows Server 2008 server under IIS 7 is pretty easy, however you have to have the right components installed.

Windows 2008 uses lots of routines from Vista, so installs are really easy, and in this version, instead of installing everything, and then disabling the features, 2008 simpy doesnt install them.

This is nice to see, we now get a screen that asks you to select the features you wish to use on this server. Tick the boxes for IIS and you have a website server.

To get ColdFusion running on the same machine, you need to do the following:

• Install 2008 server
• Add the Web Server (IIS) role
• Select ISAPI Filters
• Select IIS 6 Management Compatability

Restart IIS and Install ColdFusion as normal. Everything should be working just fine.

Meraki? Its a great piece of wireless networking hardware by manufacturers of the same name. The company is backed by Google, and was set up off the back of a research project by the boffins at MIT.

You can't beat pedigree like that! Merki creates a wireless mesh network, meaning that the more nodes you add to the network the stronger it will become. San Francisco is fast becoming a free internet zone, with Meraki and the community starting to cover residential areas with Meraki mesh networks.

They provide a number of options, the standard set up gets you a piece of hardware, that you plugin, set up, place on a map and join to an existing network if there is already one nearby. You can set up unrestricted access for your computers, iPhone, handheld device, fridge etc, and limit the speed and usage of users of the free segment.

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I have been following Apple and its range of Mac Books for a couple of years now as I have been curious how they are developing and the sudden market uptake between my colleagues and peers in the development world.

If you are looking at a purchase of any Apple product then go and check out the Mac Buyers Guide on macrumours.com. In the 12 months that its been in my book marks I have been watching their predictions, with some interest as my next laptop purchase will be a Mac Book Pro.

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SQL server has always had difficulty with its backup and maintenance plans in removing old backups. Until now this has been a major issue on some of our servers, each month someone has to go through the backup folder and remove the old Transaction Log and Full Backup folders.

No longer - Robocopy to the rescue! Its simple but oh so efficient. (I know there are many different ways to do this, Perl/ANT etc however this is what I have available on the server)

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We dont very often do much server maintenance, especially on our centralised dev and file server boxes. Mostly we don't have time, as a small team that goes through mountains of work its not a priority.

Today I had 5 minutes (!) to actually see if there was a way to automate Disk Clean up and Disk Defragmenter in Windows XP / 2003. Lo and behold:

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I have been working hard on a new site, and having put adwords up I no longer want to see my hits on the Google Analytics reports because it all just gets in the way.

Analytics gives you 2 ways of excluding traffic using the filters. The first is by IP Address, and the second is to set a cookie with a predetermined value, and filter on it.

You can use the Google Analytics regular expression generator to help you create an IP address filter. This generator can convert one IP address to a simple regular expression, or it can generate a regular expression to match a range of IP addresses.

IP Address is all very well, but what if you use a number of different machines, at home / work / airport etc? Well - setting a cookie is a good way of doing it. So far though all the tutorials I have seen suggest making a blank page, and adding some code to it to set the cookie. Why?

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I thought this article from InfoQ was worth bringing to your attention, as it was an interesting read for me, about the misconceptions Adobe come across when talking to people about Flex. We are currently a way down the path of getting one of our clients to embrace Flex, and then get the skills to build some things.

We recently did some extensive AJAX work in their application and had to make sure it degraded well, so that the same functions were available with out AJAX. If we had used Flex in this area, then there would have been no extra work to make the functions behave exactly as we needed.

In order to help the adoption of Flex, we have been running some Java script detection on the application to see how many of the users actually have Flash, if so is it v9 or later, if not is it later than v6 and so can be auto updated. Why? because this app operates within the tight SOE of banking and financial institutions.

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We have moved our email services in house over to SmarterMail because of its history, power and flexibility. We used to use MailEnable, and although we like supporting Aussie companies, Smartermail is just that bit more mature.

Now to make it easy on clients and ourselves, we have minimised the amount of knowledge required to set up new domains, and by adding this code into out intranet, its now simply a case of clicking a button to have the clients domain added, and have the details available ready to hand out. Then we simply hook up the DNS and MX records and we are off!

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This caught my eye because its a really interesting topic that I must find time to start learning about!

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I spent some tie over the weekend putting together a small project to keep my database of geographical coordinates on Australian postcodes up to date.

You can checkout the page at Australian Postcode database and you can check individual suburbs, postcodes and download the latest data in Excel format.

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